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Azure Application Gateway vs. HAProxy Community Edition

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Azure Application Gateway

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.N/A

    HAProxy Community Edition

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AHAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.

    $0

    Pricing
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    Chose Azure Application Gateway
    HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't …
    Incentivized
    Open Source
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    NetScaler
    Score8 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetScaler
    Score8 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Azure Application GatewayHAProxy Community Edition
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management.
    • With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • Low-Cost Load Balancer
    • Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
    • Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
    • SSL Termination
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Microsoft
    • More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
    • Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
    • Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Microsoft
    Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and Azure Traffic Manager) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features. Azure Firewall, although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • Positive : Improved performance and scalability
    • Positive : Better and enhanced Security
    • Positive : Efficiency
    • Negative: Cost
    • Negative: More resources to manage.
    Incentivized
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    Open Source
    • Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
    • Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
    Incentivized
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